and got away from the side; and if any sort
of order is kept, the ship could be cleared of the passengers in a quite
short time. For there must be boats enough for the passengers and crew,
whether you increase the number of boats or limit the number of
passengers, irrespective of the size of the ship. That is the only
honest course. Any other would be rather worse than putting sand in the
sugar, for which a tradesman gets fined or imprisoned. Do not let us
take a romantic view of the so-called progress. A company selling
passages is a tradesman; though from the way these people talk and behave
you would think they are benefactors of mankind in some mysterious way,
engaged in some lofty and amazing enterprise.

All these boats should have a motor-engine in them. And, of course, the
glorified tradesman, the mummified official, the technicians, and all
these secretly disconcerted hangers-on to the enormous ticket-selling
enterprise, will raise objections to it with every air of superiority.
But don't believe them. Doesn't it strike you as absurd that in this age
of mechanical propulsion, of generated power, the boats of such ultra-
modern ships are fitted with oars and sails, implements more than three
thousand years old? Old as the siege of Troy. Older! . . . And I know
what I am talking about. Only six weeks ago I was on the river in an
ancient, rough, ship's boat, fitted with a two-cylinder motor-engine of
7.5 h.p. Just a common ship's boat, which the man who owns her uses for
taking the workmen and stevedores to and from the ships loading at the
buoys off Greenhithe. She would have carried some thirty people. No
doubt has carried as many daily for many months. And she can tow a
twenty-five ton water barge--which is also part of that man's business.

It was a boisterous day, half a gale of wind against the flood tide. Two
fellows managed her. A youngster of seventeen was cox (and a first-rate
cox he was too); a fellow in a torn blue jersey, not much older, of the
usual riverside type, looked after the engine. I spent an hour and a
half in her, running up and down and across that reach. She handled
perfectly. With eight or twelve oars out she could not have done
anything like as well. These two youngsters at my request kept her
stationary for ten minutes, with a touch of engine and helm now and then,
within three feet of a big, ugly mooring buoy over which the water broke
and the spray flew in sheets,